THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY by Virginia Woolf

Author:Virginia Woolf [Woolf, Virginia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788027234851
Publisher: Musaicum Books
Published: 2017-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Money and Love.

Table of Contents

Steep though the ascent may be, the reward is ours when we stand on the top of the hill; stout though the biography undoubtedly is, the prospect falls into shape directly we have found the connecting word. The diligent reader of memoirs seeks it on every page—never rests until he has found it. Is it love or ambition, commerce, religion, or sport? It may be none of these, but something deep sunk beneath the surface, scattered in fragments, disguised behind frippery. Whatever it be, wherever it be, once found there is no biography without its form, no figure without its force. Stumbling and blundering in the first volume of Mr. Coleridge’s life of Thomas Coutts, we laid hands at length upon two words which between them licked rather a portly subject into shape, doing their work, as might be expected from their opposite natures, first this side, then that, until what with a blow here and a blow there poor Thomas Coutts was almost buffeted to death. Yet the friction kept him alive; he lived, in an emaciated condition, to the age of eighty-six. And of the two words one is money and the other is love.

Love in the first place had it all its own way. He married his brother’s servant, Susannah Starkie, a woman older than himself. If he had been a poor man the marriage would have been thought sensible enough and the wife, one may be sure, would have come in for a word of praise from the biographers. But as he was always a rich man, and became eventually the richest man in the whole of England, it was incumbent on Thomas Coutts to prove that the Starkies, though now declined, were descended from the ancient family of the Starkies of Leigh and Pennington, and it is inevitable that we should inquire whether Mrs. Coutts broke her heart and lost her wits ‘beneath the burden of an honour to which she was not born’. There is no doubt that she lost her wits. Her heart, one must suppose, since no sound of its breakage has escaped, was smothered to death. She is scarcely mentioned. Perhaps she dropped her aitches. Perhaps it was as much as she could do to stand upright at the top of the staircase in Stratton Street and shake hands with the Royal Dukes without displaying her origin. She contrived never to give offence and never to attract attention; and, from a housemaid, what more could be expected? Save for one sinister gleam when she speaks a whole sentence in her proper person, it is all dark and dim and decorous. She had her children, it is true; of whom three daughters survived. But the children were heiresses, and must be sent to fashionable schools, where Mr. Coutts, more ambitious for them than for himself, hinted his wish that they should make friends with the daughters of Lord George Sutton, ‘as I should like them to be acquainted with honest people’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.